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Internet Archive’s 2013 Annual Celebration

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A month ago on October 24th (computer geeks know this number 1024 as 2^10), staff and friends of the Internet Archive (IA) converged at archive.org's 300 Funston Avenue offices for an annual celebration of their mission to provide access to a free, safe and open internet. IA's founder, Brewster Kahle, spoke of recent milestones such as the growth of the data set to 15 Petabytes up from just a few last year, and the launch of the TV News archive. Other highlights included the new (and largest collection) of vintage software; eliminating the 404 Error from browsers; improvements on the WayBack Machine; an expanded emulator - MESS; and the growing size of their hard copy collection arising from individual donations. Let us explore a few of these.

TV News

This service enables users to search TV news for phrases found in past broadcasts. One can quote, save, and even share search results. IA will be receiving a donation of 140,000 tapes containing 35 years of TV history, and dating back to the 1970s. This is the Marion Stokes collection of TV news.

404 Errors and the Way Back machine

Isn’t it rather disturbing that 49 percent of links to Supreme Court rulings are broken? What about Wikipedia, where 125,000 links are currently broken! Way back is fixing the 404 errors resulting from these breaks by crawling all pages that blogs link to, using a Wordpress broken link checker plugin. When a user gets a 404 error, suggestions are presented from IA and if the correct address is identified, the link will be fixed. This is because IA will subsequently provide permanent urls (PURLs) for such corrected links. It was also announced that 361 billion pages are currently saved on way back machine.

Security

IA does not record IP addresses of readers! No national security letters forcing identity disclosures have been served to date. They sued the US government regarding such disclosures and were granted relief. In the spirit of free, open, safe internet, Kahle revealed that archive.org was encrypted by default starting that day, the 24th. Open library is also encrypted by default - End to End.

Openness

In their quest to facilitate public access to public domain/content, IA is providing access to judgements from the court of appeals - 1 million Federal cases now available. Access to journal literature is another goal. Over 1 million articles are available on IA. Attendants at the celebration were reminded about the existing exemption for the blind and dyslexic to digitize books and reformat them for easier accessibility, and that IA has over 1 million books for blind and dyslexic.

Visit archive.org to explore these and many other resources which might interest our patrons at SUL.